I have, for some time, been concerned about the environmental impact of the textile industry and also the welfare of garment workers in many countries that we know to have terrible working conditions and low pay.
I have been following an organisation for a couple of years called ‘Fashion Revolution’.
I came up with an idea to make a patchwork from unwanted clothes with the labels on show and wanted to title the piece ‘#whomademyclothes’, the hashtag that was created and used by Fashion Revolution. I thought I should contact them to ask them if they were happy for me to use the hashtag as a title and they were delighted. After a couple of emails, it was decided that I should use 1,134 labels to represent the number of people who were killed in the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013:
http://fashionrevolution.org/about/why-do-we-need-a-fashion-revolution/
After a bit of trial and error, I am now carefully removing the labels from generous donations of unwanted clothes and taking the clothes intact to the charity shops. I am sewing them onto 11″ x 8″ panels and I have calculated I will need 56 panels.
So far I have completed 9:
All the panels will be sewn together to make a patchwork blanket about 2 metres almost square. I need to complete it by April when I am due to show again at Uni and also to coincide with Fashion Revolution week when they will showcase the piece.
Meanwhile, I still continue to run life drawing sessions at Draw, here are some new drawings since my last post:
I also completed 2 new hand embroideries over the Christmas period, the use of patchwork is beginning to come into play:
The Embroidered Male will go to the summer show at the Artwave West Gallery in Dorset along with 2 or 3 more pieces I made before I started my MA.
